Advances in the management and archiving of digital data are proceeding apace, but how valuable are the data accumulating in our repositories? In this presentation, I report on the Site Based Data Curation (SBDC) project, a collaboration among information scientists, geobiologists, data archiving experts, and resource managers at Yellowstone National Park (YNP). Guided by indicators of value for research data, the project is developing a curation framework for data from scientifically significant sites. The curation guidelines and processes focus on description and organization of reusable datasets for scientific aims, while also satisfying YNP’s needs to improve coordination of data collection and management of resources and research activity at YNP.